Involuntary displacement persists as an unwelcome item on national and international agendas. Despite strenuous efforts being made to enhance living standards and protect human rights, each year another 10 million people are uprooted and impoverished by development projects. They join a pool of 50 million refugees displaced over the years by conflict and political persecution. These displacements unleash multiple risks of impoverishment, initiate unnecessary human suffering, harm social and economic development, and undermine the civil society of the displacees and their hosts. Displacement increasingly spills over national boundaries, threatening regional development and economic integration. In response, multilateral agencies are adopting policies to address the counter-development impacts of displacement. The World Bank Group has undertaken a bankwide review of its portfolio to determine the impact of its guidelines and improve its policy and procedures. In 1991, all 25 OECD countries signed formal guidelines for involuntary resettlement in projects they finance. Regional development banks are strengthening their policies, operations, and staffing in resettlement and displacement issues. And, although emerging less rapidly, new national policies and legal frameworks are proving indispensable to resolving, with adequate resources, the problems created by displacement. Technical progress is also being made to understand how to control the social, cultural, environmental and economic processes set in motion by displacement. From 9-13 September 1996, experts on involuntary resettlement and displacement convened for the Second International Conference on Displacement and Resettlement at the University of Oxford, England. Delegates from 24 industrialised and developing countries - scholars, practitioners, government representatives, bilateral and multilateral donors, and NGO representatives - struggled with ways to improve the first generation models and to incorporate the cumulative, social knowledge on displacement and apply this knowledge to the challenge of reconstructing the livelihood of displaced people. The single most significant technical finding is that displacement need not necessarily lead to impoverishment - as expressed in its many forms including landlessness, homelessness, deteriorating health and nutritional standards, a loss of food security, unemployment, loss of access to commonly shared resources, disarticulation of the social bonds, and marginalisation. Ample social knowledge has established that simple compensation or relief does not permit the displaced to reconstruct and improve their livelihoods on a productive basis nor does it protect the integrity of societal and cultural groups. Rather, risk reduction and reconstruction requires a solid legal and policy framework; carefully crafted, long term social, cultural and economic development programmes; adequate allocation of financial and institutional resources, and trust in and promotion of the capacity of the displaced. The technical findings on reconstructing livelihoods of displaced peoples are attached.

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